Editing or document creation capabilities in high tech devices, from large computers to small hand-held devices, fall into two general categories. First is the type of editor most users have come to expect in desk-top systems from the major vendors, including Microsoft®, Apple®, Sun Microsystems®, etc. These full-functional editors provide a rich environment for a user, including the ability to insert or embed a wide variety of objects in a file. The embeddable objects include the ability to embed pictures or symbols.
The second type of editor is the basic text editor that is used with mobile phones, PDAs, embedded systems, and the like. These devices are resource constrained, having both memory and CPU limitations not present in general purpose desk top computers and larger systems. Because of these resource limitations, text editors currently found in these environments do not have the ability to embed arbitrary objects in documents. Their functionality is limited to character-based text editing, often without formatting support and certainly without the ability to embed non-text objects in a text string.
Thus, there is a need for an efficient way of placing pictorial objects and/or symbols in text strings, or simple documents, using resource-constrained text editors.